Archives for September 2018

Change means that you want to shift body and mind into a new mode of action and thought. Here are 2 steps to create change in your life.

Mind and body are both important and work together. You can’t imagine that the body is just a simple vehicle. Science and psychology divide the mind and body for examination, but we live as an organism that functions as a whole.

Change creates a new situation in your life that causes stress – it can be positive stress when it’s something you want to happen, like moving up into a better zone of confidence and happiness.

When the mind and body is confronted by new and unknown challenges it will rebel – because it wants to protect you. It wants to ensure that you don’t lose your nice comfy situation that seemed to be working just fine for a while.

This is caused by the amygdala function and the memory working together, The process has been described and simplified many times in articles, but this so called “raptor” function of the brain is not so primitive as people describe it to be. It’s a high function in the decision making process that goes a lot deeper than simple flight or fight responses.

Your fight or flight response depends on who you are, your experiences in life and dealing with new situations where you don’t have much to go on in the memory banks area of your brain.

If you approach the situation with calm and intelligence, in spite of it being stressful, you’ll discover that you can overcome fear and deeper compulsions to run back to the comfort of your old life, much easier.

We all realise how important it is to keep moving, keep looking for opportunities and take up new challenges. The mind enjoys these things, it’s just that the shifting from warmth to cold and then on to new warm waters causes it to dig its heels in.

The mind loves to explore new ideas, it can go around and around for days and weeks investigating a new thought, attaching new ideas to it, and coming back to the original conclusion. Just so long as you don’t include the body in action and expect the mind to follow your will to execute the thought and realise it into the world. That sort of thinking creates fear.

When we develop a new idea and plan it, and the time to execute comes around, the mind baulks. It reels back and says, “hey, wait a minute! I didn’t know we were serious about this plan.” It digs its heels in and gives us a thousand damned good reasons to wait, check the planning, watch out for a better option – just don’t do it now.

Doing it, is commiting to the plan and the results. We will have to take responsibility for the outcome of our thinking and our actions – what if it turns out to be a terrible result? All these ideas bubble up into the conscious feelings and often manifest themselves more in the form of emotions than clear worded thoughts in our minds – we don’t want to be caught out admitting our fears, so the mind will become devious and send impulses and signals that make us feel like it’s better to wait a while before we do something. Those emotions can be mighty powerful motivators.

However long we wait, nothing will change for the better.

You can only know if a plan will work by doing it.

When you know what it is that you want, you are in the strong position to make goals. Goals are so important to creating success in life, they are the fuel of motivations. Goals and motivation combat fears, together they create a feeling of wanting to get going on a project.

Motivations are the driving forces that keep us moving along the path to success, and the goal is the sign post that helps us stay on track.

It’s amazing that we live in a world so full of opportunity, yet so many people don’t achieve much at all in life. They have their dreams, they are inspired by ideas, but they fail to set goals and take them seriously, and they don’t use their own personal resources to achieve their objectives.

Your goals should be meaningful if you want them to be lasting and motivating.

To find something meaningful in life is like discovering who you really are. It becomes a no-brainer situation, you know without doubt that you want to put things into action.

1.To create the changes necessary to cause a shift from ‘not much happening’ to a lot of things happening and heading towards success and achievement, you need to first identify clearly what the first step is towards your goal.

It’s that simple. Just know what you want, and clearly see the first step that will lead to the next step along the path to successful achievement.

Know what you want? Well, spend time with yourself, take yourself seriously and ask deep questions about what aspects of life, community, people, business and contributing to the world really wakes you up. It’s when you ask deep and difficult questions of yourself, that you begin to see who you are, what you would really like to see happening in your life. It reveals the things that you find meaningful in life.

Write your thoughts down, then a day later revisit your writing and do the same again, and again, repeat writing things down until your pen runs out of ink or your computer groans under the weight of your thinking.

Be an investigator of yourself and you will discover what you want.

You will then know what step is needed to begin your journey.

2. You must step out into the new path with great confidence. This firstly comes from knowing that the goal you have chosen is really what you want. You see it clearly defined. Real confidence is a powerful mental tool that stems from your ability to concentrate.

Concentration can be developed. It is something that grows with practise. Learning to focus on the most important things, actions that will help you achieve your goal, is the first step in developing concentration and therefore achieving confidence that will bolster you when met by an unexpected challenge.

Concentration gives us the ability to see things clearly, and from that comes great confidence in our actions.

The practice of concentration allows the mind to penetrate an idea deeply. In so doing, it reveals the true nature of the object of focus.

Concentration is what successful business people do, it’s what artist do to understand the object they are working on, and it’s what we all should do to lead more meaningful and understanding lives.

When you set your goals, make sure that you know which is your main goal. Any other goals that you have and which are connected to the main goal must be put into a subset of goals that always take second place in terms of importance.

Giving yourself a main goal to achieve is a big task. It takes time. The subsets of goals should be parts of the whole. They should each lead into each other in a harmonious set of actions to be completed and achieved over time.

Set deadlines, be brave and tell yourself when your goal should be accomplished.

Break goals down into manageable chunks of ideas that make sense to you and allow you to concentrate totally on your daily tasks.

Bob Proctor talks about vibrations that are caused in our lives . We set things in motion through actions and this causes a new set of vibrations to resonate in our body and mind. He’s right, we are living, the universe is living and vibrations are shifting and moving things. Nothing is still, or dead. Even dying leaves of a tree are shifting and changing. Our thoughts and actions have an enormous effect on our ability to influence the environment around us. Thoughts that are honed sharply, clear and fine, cut through problems like a sword through an apple. Focus gives us the ability to be sharp minded.

If we have set solid true goals and we concentrate totally on these things as if they are the most important goals in our lives, we will set new vibrations into the play of cause and effect of how things change and how things happen.

Our plans will manifest through our actions, our actions our directly connected to the precision of our thinking. To know exactly what you want to achieve, to be meaningful and authentic in actions will cause you to cut through any obstacle with great confidence and experience successful accomplishments in life.

We begin to develop friendships when we are children. We go to school and we meet other kids, we play, we talk and exchange ideas about what we like best.

At that age, it’s all an experiment on how to develop a relationship. We don’t stop to ask what type of relationship we are building when we are small people and our only real interests are based on how much fun can we cram into this time together.

These feelings of playfulness in friendships never fade away, but they do get challenged by the over serious attitudes of growing up, becoming mature and wanting to be accepted as an adult who can navigate people effectively.

It’s through playfulness that we really see and understand another person’s point of view, their attitude towards you, and how they value being around you. It’s this value that we get from a friendship that defines what type of relationship we’re having.

Friendships can last a lifetime. Unfortunately, according to statistics, we will all experience the breakdown and loss of friends due to one thing or another. Often we are left standing and wondering what happened.

Why do some friendships that seemed so bound by closeness, openness and shared experiences go into fade and fizzle mode?

One idea that psychologists express, is that the friendship fizzled out because as time passed values changed. Values about what life is, what fun is and how to enjoy time together can change as we learn more about ourselves and the world.

Men, when they are young can often meet adult friends while socialising in a bar – the common meeting place when not much is happening on a friday night. One reason why people visit bars and cafes is because it offers the possibility of ‘something interesting happening’. That happening is slightly out of your control and therefore represents an idea of a playful environment where anything could happen. Singles who seek a partner for a romantic experience, or bored and lonely people in search of companionship with like-minded contemporaries. All of these people can be found in a bar.

Good friendships have been made in bars. The drink loosens up the inhibitions and the jokes flutter from the lips like the best of comedians. At the end of a great night with a bunch of strangers, phone numbers and emails are exchanged and at least one call or text is made to keep contact.

The result is often a good start to a friendship that will blossom into a valuable relationship with another human being, or it will become an attempt at making friends. Meeting up again in some place and in spite of not really knowing the person can be a little stressful, feel a bit forced – unless that first meeting creates a click response that seems to magically cause everything to be alright between you and the other person. Then a friendship begins and you find out who that person really is – over time.

The Double Edged Sword of Friendships

Remember when you where a kid? You made friends played and enjoyed. Summer came and automatically you knew which kids you wanted to spend the most time with, playing, exploring and find things out.

How many summers can you remember that ended in tears? Well, that still happens to us.

We make friends in all sorts of social and work situations. We can never be sure where a friendship is going, so we tend to allow things to develop of its own accord. There’s nothing wrong with that, its the playful way to develop an encounter with another person into a fact finding situation.

It’s just a shame when the time comes and we realise that our new friend, or a friend who’s been around in our lives for a while, becomes a pain in the butt. Suddenly, we feel that things have gone haywire, they seem to express odd ideas or no longer want to join in when it comes to the usual things we do. They were happy enough before, but then something changed.

A good friend always expects their own good friends to be tolerant and understanding of their faults and shortcomings. That’s a healthy attitude to have about friendships, best buddies will have your back even in times when you make mistakes or make a total fool of yourself. But when things change and stay changed, we can see that there has been a change of heart. A friend has been thinking about stuff. Life has been a bit difficult, maybe, and they began to ask questions about themselves and certain values that they have.

They didn’t come and talk to you about it because it was outside of your common experience.

Often, it takes time to understand another person’s values in life. It’s about knowing what is important to them, how they react in certain situations and how much of a giver and a taker they are. These are the tell-tale signs of values.

Some people need a lot of practice to get it right with friendships. They can meet a person and realise that they can get something from them, they can use them to advance their own agenda at work or in social life.

In an attempt to grow, to become more mature about life and put things into a hierarchical form of perspective, people will often go into selfish mode. They have to, they need to take stock and see what doesn’t work anymore.

What doesn’t work anymore can often be replaced by something new, a new value or a way of seeing things with more relevance to their own needs – you might not fit in anymore, or it might be a decision for that person to make, they may realise that they have to let you go. They need to move on.

We put a lot of effort into our real friends, but life is life, it’s a growing and learning experience. People make conscious decisions about what and who is valuable to them. Even the best friendships are a sort of utility that offers support and help in times when we need something. It could be money or emotional need, but hopefully, in a real friendship it’s always been a by-product of how close and open you both are with each other.

Social needs are a powerful emotional force within us. Nobody can honestly claim not to want friends. Some people like to claim that they can’t be bothered with all that emotional back and forth between people, and so say that they are happy without a deeper relationship with a person. Watch them and see them do just the opposite – they need friends, people around them and the security that friendship brings us, just as much as the next person.

We can get burned, be dropped suddenly, a good friend announces that he or she is leaving town for good, and won’t be back again. We deal with it, learn from it and realise that life itself and all it offers is why we are here. Friends are partners in crime, buddies along the way, and a place to go and be secure and open up our hearts in times of trouble. They last that long.

If you have a friend who’s been around for many years and you are already growing old, then you are one lucky person. Most people get to middle-age with a heart full of memories about old friends, and head full of questions about what happened to them.

Today, facebook and social media allows us to track down old friends and see from a distance what they might be doing. The old story of going down memory lane is quite true. It’s generally a bad idea.

If you meet an old friend again, the chances that they are really the same person from all those years ago is slim. If they are the same, then you ask the question; what on earth have they been doing – living in a bunker some place under the ground? They left you in order to change, or because they felt a change coming. Maybe that didn’t happen.

I’ve bumped into old friends from years ago. We chatted and caught up a little. It doesn’t take long to realise that there’s no common ground anymore, we have become different people.

This often becomes apparent when the one person begins to talk soley about the old times, the things we used to do together. An uncomfortable feeling arises hoping that they aren’t suggesting that I drop everything and take up where we parted all that time ago. I’ve got new values in my life.

Families grow, jobs and careers develop into responsibilities, and personal needs about socialising and fun become more defined as we age.

Young people are playing a game. They’re out on the town looking for a soul mate, or an experience that they can put into their diary for later life reading. Most of the time they are testing each other, seeing who is sincere, or who is up for a wild-time for an adventure. This is why they, young people, tend to judge each other by superficial means, important as they are, music and books represent values and ideas. I think today, which social media you use might be a judgmental thing. Some social networks are for young people and some for mature audiences. The music you listen to echoes your own message, often about your attitude to love and friendships.

All of this is an experiment to find out who is who, and what they believe in. As we get older we become more secure about who we are – healthy people can reject an asshole quickly, and not mistake her for a cool person who is just having a laugh at other people’s expense. When you are young and meet a person who loves the same music as you, has read a few books that you have read, then that’s a basis for a connection to try and go deeper.

Later in life books and music are important, if you had good taste. But, family and work which both offer security based on responsible attitudes of those involved can replace many fleeting friendships that might be a bit too much emotion for us. We don’t go seeking adventure in bars and clubs, or hope to hook up with somebody who is cooler than us. The pseudo promises of an adventure that bars offer, doesn’t appeal anymore.

We have developed our thoughts and ideas into solid beliefs about who we are. Old friends can stay old friends and making new friends, which is a refreshing thing to do, is approached with caution. We have something to protect back home, which is where our real life, our solid values are waiting for us.

Take away from this article

We develop the ability to make friends when we play games, especially when we are kids.

We go through life learning about ourselves by reflecting on how we handle relationships.

We discover that friendships, however deep and meaningful they seem, can fizzle out as we understand more and mature into functional human beings.

As young adults we are still learning to make friends. We have to base them on utility. Is it a romantic friendship? Or, Is it a Friendship based on understanding another human being similar to me?

Some people only see value in utility. They use people and have many so called friends that come and go.

When friendships fizzle out, it’s often because of the fact that experiences in life come from many different angles of the day. Your friend will encounter and experience things that are outside of the common experience between you both. They can’t always talk to you about it, they’ll make their own decisions.

It’s perfectly normal to lose good friends. We need to understand how to let people go their own way so that they can mature and learn. And how doing so helps us to understand our own values and needs in life.

As we get older our values change. We take on responsibilities that offer more security, so they come first and new friendships have to develop more organically.

It’s perfectly normal to go through life with only two good friends at any time. You can give time to two friends, but try being there for ten or fifteen demanding friends everyday.

Starting out with a new idea in business – becoming an entrepreneur at 50 plus of age, can seem like a wild ass idea to some baby-Boomers. But Steve Siebold, the author of “How Rich People Think”, has a different take on being older, wiser and ready for the challenges of making it as a 50 plus entrepreneur.

According to Steve Siebold, once you hit the big 5-0, you have a wealth of knowledge that the younger generations just don’t, and can’t possess. Life is a great teacher. Life serves up its ups & downs so that we are faced with hardships, tough times and happy times, again and again life teaches us how to live life, what we can expect, and it teaches us the importance of persistence and tenacity in living life and getting what we want. Steve Siebold interviewed well over 1200 successful people to get to the heart of the matter – what makes them successful in their endeavours as sales people and business people.

He’s convinced that if you have an idea that offers value and use to other people and you focus on delivering that idea to the right people, people who need it, then you will be successful. Business is a tough path to traverse for most people, but when you have a lifetime of knowledge about what a real set-back is, and what is nothing more than the type of problem that always crops up when you try to shift something, then you’ll find the path becomes easier.

Younger people have a wealth of information at their hands. They can learn quickly and efficiently from the internet, the social interactions of the internet help to facilitate learning and exchange of ideas more rapidly than we could have back in our youth. The difference is, if you’re over 50 years old, you’ve already taken that hard earned knowledge and put it to task. You’ve been through the mill and seen, first hand, what works and what’s bullshit. Knowing the difference helps develop a better decision making brain, and a great BS detector. Something that every Millenial should develop rapidly, the internet and its information sources being what they are.

I suspect that we over 50s, have learned our lessons on the road of life. We didn’t get our knowledge and information from a portal with a shiny screen. That makes an enormous difference to the outcome.

The problem of knowledge and energy needed

50 Plus People tend to move into that age bracket with a few questions. “What will happen to me?”, is common. “If I’m still fit and healthy, what should I do with my life?”, is another question that helps us to define an important new phase in life. Other people are already on the ball, they know what they want and are probably working hard at building a new business already.

Having the energy to take up a new venture, however big or small it is, requires a commitment that means a significant energy input. Daily tasks and demands that crop up in the business can be dealt with by a fifty-year-old with a lot more calm and methodical ease than a younger person who views these things as a reason for panic attacks.

Modern business is about being niche, being defined as to what it is that you are offering your potential clients. Your niche can be something new and exciting on the market, or it can be a new take on an old service or product that you present in a much more personalised way than other businesses. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel – ’cause there’s no market for it.

A middle aged person has a long memory. There are a few old ideas that have been forgotten, they lie dormant in your own memory and might just serve as a kickstart idea to develop something the market needs today.

Skills that you need, or may already have, are the tools that will help you reach those customers and present your offer. Marketing online is a skill to learn and it doesn’t matter which business you’re in, marketing is tops when it comes to being able to reach your clients. Advertising skills are about copywriting and design. How to put really interesting and attractive creatives together that will cause a client to stop and look, then read and click through to your offer. If you don’t know anything about internet marketing you can learn enough to feel confident within a few weeks of solid reading – just be sure to read the good stuff, not the BS written by the “sign up to my course and you’ll get rich in weeks”, type of “marketing gurus”. There are good quality YouTube videos on marketing, and great books that don’t bore the socks off you which are available. Make marketing a main study for your business – it’s always in the centre of things, it’s the motor that makes noise, and it’ll sound sweet when you get it right, or it’ll sound like it needs an overhaul and a tune-up if you get it wrong.

You can only truly begin to understand the concepts of marketing as a small business when you do it. That means investing some cash into your ideas. Don’t invest your life-savings into it and believe throwing money at it will make things work. Build a good marketing plan for each area of promotion, such as building a brand – your name and the quality of service you offer. Build another type of campaign about reaching clients with a call to action to get them to buy the service or product. Monitor everything, check results and cross-reference everything you do. Always have a good reason why you want to spend more in a campaign, or end a campaign.

Marketing campaigns will bring results if you have figured out your offer and present it clearly. Look into “funnels”, a common sales funnel is used to create trust and engagement on the the client’s side. Something salespeople have done for centuries. It works if set up correctly, it’s a good starting point for a service business to think about.

Advertising, sales, and marketing knowledge is a must these days. It’s also a great way to step into the world of business if you haven’t done that until now. Reading about marketing will show many examples of how other people’s businesses came to understand their market and begin to get traction in their niche.

Who has done this before you?

To answer all the questions that generalise the passage from the 40s into the 50s we do what human beings always do, we look around and observe those people who have been there and are already busy doing something enjoyable and useful with their middle age life. Business is an obvious choice – unless you happen to be lucky enough to be able to retire and go live in a villa in a hot country , as you please. Otherwise, setting up with something totlly new in your life, can be an exciting and enlivening adventure.

The best place to start is to browse a few profiles of people who have changed their lives as they became older. You’d be surprised how many people who went for it, took a risk and put their hearts into a totally new venture, didn’t just get a comfortable new occupation, but really developed their idea into a money making lifestyle. Some people became millionaires after 50 years of age, and it’s not too few.

Why should you start a new business

The options for life are wide and varied. The options at 50 years old and more about paying the bills are minimal and the same as they ever were – you must pay the bills, or you don’t get the luxury of heat and light, a car, a home or any other thing that turns you on. These things never go away.

So, what would you do if you had to change now? Sit on your backside and watch T.V. or would you prefer to discover new things and see how much juice you still have, make a mark and build your signature piece?

Your skills and the desire to succeed, and the Internet

When I was a teenager, people would always say that “the future of business is service industries”. That was said in a world where the average person went to work with muscles and braun. Office jobs were for people who didn’t like to get their hands dirty and working on a building site was great way to earn good money on a daily basis. Factory work was all over the place and would serve as a stop gap until something better came up, shop work and sales jobs were advertised left right and centre in the newspapers. Opportunity to do better was to try your hand at direct selling – often insurance or double-glazing windows, some people made a fortune as a company’s star salesperson, many fell by the wayside after discovering that they’d failed to read the advert correctly, it said,”Make loads of money selling our product, outgoing and hard working people apply now.”, they didn’t read the bit about hard work. Today, some of those people are still waiting for their lottery ticket to come up.

At middle age, you know who you are and what you are capable of in business. I wouldn’t want to have to go out cold-calling everyday anymore, I know how hard it is. The cold weather, the stoney faces at the door, the better knowers and the empty offices that you discover after trudging up to the third floor in an office block. These are thoughts that come from lessons of life, trying things out and seeing what fits.

As we get older we should never give up testing things, things we already know can change their meaning in different environments and contexts. Always testing and trying ideas is a good habit that leads to moments of discovery.

The generation before the Baby-Boomers were a bloody-minded lot, they had to be. Their choices were minimised by a society surviving World Wars and constantly trying to rebuild the economies to get to ground zero where a bit prosperity could show its petals. That generation did things, got on with it whether they liked it or not. they knew that hard graft and toil would put bread on the table and not much more could be expected.

They were our parents and they handed down their knowledge to us – the baby boomers, the over 50s. We were taught that life is hard and you’d better knuckle down and do what the boss tells you otherwise you’re out on your ear.

But, we saw that society was changing with the swinging sixties and the economic boom. New economies and new money was flowing into the pockets of a few lucky buggers who got in quick.

Fast forward several decades and we are still here, older and wiser, and still in wonder at the rapidity of change in our own lifetimes.

Our health is better than our parents’ health generally was. Our pockets have more disposable cash than ever, and we want for better gadgets and living space more than we worry about where the next meal is coming from. Yet, all those lessons learned through parents still hanker in the mind. “Knuckle down, work hard, listen to the boss and do as you’re told.”

What we discover is that these rules of knuckle down etc, were good for the previous generation only, they don’t make the rules anymore. Bosses are being replaced by coaching methods of management through encouragement and helpful co worker cooperation. Work is more of a creative process combined with hard work and smart thinking. Not to outwit the competition but to come up with a great offer to help the client solve a problem.

Creativity and smarts are what are needed today, we need to dispense with the advice of grafters and work with the intuition and self knowledge of fifty plus year olds who have had a different experience of life than the previous generation had. Firstly, embrace the internet and learn about it. It ain’t going away, it is growing into something big and invasive whether we want it or not.

To build a business today, you need the internet. Just by accepting that idea you begin to take it more seriously, and you begin to see how useful it is to you and your business.

The internet is full of things. Those things can be useful or useless – it just depends on who’s looking at it.

You will discover that building knowledge of how to start a business at 50 plus is an exciting and challenging idea. Many of the things that you need to know can be found on the internet, or you can be nudged into the right direction to find the things you need to know about.

Sticking to goals and Optimism

Being a person who is mature, experienced and still full of the love of life, is the key factor that means the difference between success and failure. Younger people don’t and can’t have these things. They have to earn it through living and loving their way through the twisty-turny path of life.

There are a lot of lottery mentality people out there. They tend to kid themselves that their number will come up at some point, the great opportunity will land on their desk one morning and change their lives forever. We all think about these scenarios a few times in life, and some people start to believe in them as a possibility – they never stop to figure out the odds. These are “The Secret”, or “Law of Attraction” mentality people, who believe they can cause wads of cash to mysteriously turn up on their bank accounts without explanation.

This type of thinking claims that the power of your mind is all it takes to get wealthy. The power of your mind? Surely that includes thinking, planning and astute observation of how things actually work in the world. Don’t pop their bubble, they are happy to believe that their mind is all powerful and will be able to game the economic system that has been created by the banks. They’re enjoying the music, so let them listen.

Life gives us opportunities to take or leave. They are always there, it just depends on what you’re thinking about when you see them. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”, a person who has spent the last twenty years working in IT Apps, may well jump at a new opportunity to develop and market the latest form of App that makes everyday life easier for millenials. Another person, who has spent years driving a cab wouldn’t have a clue where to start. But if he or she looked a little deeper they may discover that the world of Apps makes sense as an opportunity in developing something that solves a travellers problem – like finding a hotel that suits them and booking it before they arrive, or simply finding out where the best coffee in town can be found while travelling around Europe. There are plenty of middle-aged cab drivers who have great business ideas out there, and there are plenty of young and ambitious App Designers waiting for an idea.

Being older, having traversed the terrain and built a map, is a powerful place to be in life. The App that sits between our ears is often forgotten and overridden by some smart-arse with a digital notebook that goes beep-beep for the next appointment. But to trust in human nature, and to view the world through the eyes of experience is the most sought after knowledge and power that one could wish for. There isn’t much else to need in order to make a go of it, or to take a risk and build something really neat that will benefit others, solve their problems and bring a bit or a lot of profit your way.

Short story writing is a satisfying and rewarding experience. It can also be mind boggling for many people who want to write.

The long tradition of telling stories goes back to many theories and ideas of how people entertained one another.

The version I like is that short stories originated on the village square. People who had seen things, been places or just experienced something quite fantastic would get themselves down to the centre of town, the town square and tell bystanders all about what happened.

Imagine, long before the telephone, long before newspapers and printed words, people spoke to each other about what they’d seen and heard.

Normally these conversation included tales from distant places.
People born in a town or village, would often spend most of their life working and living only in that town.

The idea of travelling too far abroad was a waste of time. Self-sufficient villages and towns had most of what they needed.

But, occasionally, somebody would turn up on the town square. They would come with tales of strange happenings in the mountains, or a yarn about odd people encountered in another village 30 miles to the East.

The town square, a place to gather and find out what’s been happening in the city, what the counsel of King or Queen had said at some meeting. It was the place to be in the know, to catch up and get into the loop of the gossip.

You can probably imaging that there were a good few stories told. The best ones would be carried on to the next gossiper and probably embellished a little. Then continually passed on around the town until the original story was lost in the improvements made through chatter and gossip.

The tall man with a sword that a person saw one day, would soon become a giant with the biggest sword ever seen.

The traveller who was invited to a fiesta or festival, may have been given such strong wine or mead, that his or her brain became so addled and confused, their story, that they tell their townsfolk back home, soon becomes the tale of a dream land where the people only dance and celebrate all day. Not bad, I’d love to find this place.

When we write short stories – or long stories – we are searching our memories for to support the structures and ideas that we use to build the scenes and passages the make up a story.

It’s possible to write biography, and work hard at being accurate. Or, you can write a loose account of a person and see it as entertainment value story that puts a smile on a reader’s face.

The characters that we use to develop an idea for a story often come from real life. Except, they are mostly composite of group of people. Somehow, I believe, the mind is capable of mixing things up without feeling guilty, or having some psychological breakdown, saying it’s all wrong.
It allows these embellishments.

Maybe, it’s connected to the ability and need for the mind to build metaphors to understand life.

I love writing stories – it’s hard to write a good one, but keep going , I do.

What are your thoughts on story writing?
Do you have a theory about why and how we write?

Here’s a story about a man who has really got under everybody’s skin. People either hate him, or are baffled by his deeds, or they just throw their hands in the air and say, “I don’t understand how he ever got to where he is!”.

When I wrote it, it was a reaction to all the news that we get shoved in our faces. My head full of the news stories from the square, the comments and the cries of. ‘it can’t be true!’, for me, Donald Trump is all types of things. He could be likened to Boris Johnson, the former British Foreign Minister, but Boris is a buffoon who puts his foot in it often, his motormouth always speaks with a vulgar tongue.

Trump is much more than that, Trump can destroy with his words – himself or others. He is dangerous only because he wields power, the highest power bestowed upon any American is his. He can make decisions and mistakes, and therewith destroy life and values that Americans hold dear.

Donald Trump offers a character begging to be lampooned or charcatured by writers and artists. There is so much confusion that oozes from his windy mouth, that makes hard to decide what exactly he is as a person.

So, I wrote my long-short story to tell the crowds who stand in the village square and wait for a juicy morsel to come their way.

I hope you take a look, have a read and a laugh. To laugh at calamities, or mock confusion is ok, it makes for a joke to lighten the darkness.